Our Guide: Dark Mofo 2019

Dark Mofo will cast a spell over Hobart for three bewitching weeks, from 6–23 June. Things are growing wild this year, with several new venues incorporated into the forest-themed 2019 festival. The packed program features an eclectic mix of art, music, theatre, film, festive parties, and dangerous thoughts.

Prepare to join hands and skip off into the deathly-dark forest. We’ve put together a little guide below to keep you out of too much trouble (there’s also a handy map). Remember, don’t trust smooth-talking wolves or little old ladies.

Fatten up your bony fingers (but not too much) at the Dark Mofo + City of Hobart Winter Feast. Under 10s can explore new flavours with Fire & Ice (4–5pm nightly), a new kids’ program focused on native foods and the stories behind them. [Tickets on entry, u/16 free, all free after 8pm + on 23 June]

Why follow stale bread crumbs when there are warm red lights to guide you? Paint The Town Red is back with lights on from 1 June, enveloping businesses, homes, hotels, and landmarks.

Dark Path

Yes, we’re heading down it. Discover many strange, wondrous and contemplative artworks along Dark Path, a new 4 km public art walk between the Regatta Grounds, Queens Domain, and Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens.

6th: As night falls, traipse up to the old Beaumaris Zoo to bear witness to a ‘digital de-extinction’ of the legendary Tasmanian tiger via sweeping projections, sound and light.

Take This, For It Is My Body: Take tea and scones at Government House, while three Aboriginal performers offer you a provocative choice (tickets $15).

Missing or Dead: A memorial to 180 children stolen or lost during Tasmania’s early colonial years.

Demon Core: A radioactive metal sphere emits flashes of light and sound, causing tanks of luminescent matter to glow and fade in the darkness.

Limbic Resonance: Listen out, as rituals of primal screaming and meditative breathing ring across the dark gardens. With candles, bells, salt, soil, mirrors and her voice, Blacklock explores mythologies of the witch.

Enclosure: Explore the human urge to alter, capture and reproduce the natural environment—but also, how we distinguish ourselves from it.

All This Coming and Going: Roam through a sprawling outdoor installation about humankind’s fatal relationship with the ocean (a dozen shipping containers and a bar).

All This Coming and Going, Terrapin | Image courtesy of the artist and Dark Mofo

A Forest

Run amok in A Forest, a new art precinct at the former Forestry Tasmania building in Melville Street. This is no walk in the park; discover confronting artwork, loud noises, performance, and the violent undergrowth of human nature. [$20 timed entry on the hour]

Universal Estate: A nightly, durational dance bad dream, set in a retro-futurist beige enclosure in the middle of a huge, derelict office.

Song of the Phenomena: A decommissioned particle accelerator transforms the decomposing atoms in bananas and pomegranates—naturally radioactive due to their high potassium—into sound.

Bunghole: An industrial vacuum pump sucks at empty oil drums, causing them to implode at random.

Real Violence: Bear witness, via a virtual reality headset, to the artist carrying out a violent act on a city street.

The bizarre

On Saturday 22 June at 7:42 am, shiver, shrivel and turn all of your cheeks a little bit blue at the Nude Solstic Swim, Long Beach, Sandy Bay.

Visit Japanese artist Saeborg’s latex wonderland, featuring giant pigs and an inflatable, technicolour farmyard, in the old Avalon Theatre.

Towards a Black Square: Watch a live feed of a blindfolded Mike Parr in an undisclosed location, navigating a bare gallery space with brush and black paint. The location will later be opened as a temporary exhibition.

¢ompo$t is a rotten mess of performance, installation and video works at the Old Hobart Blood Bank & Merchant Store, exploring transformation, exchange, and currency.

The Aftermath Dislocation Principle: Outside Hobart Town Hall, peer through observation ports cut into a forty-foot shipping container. Discover a vast landscape in miniature: a desolate, mythical English town in the aftermath of a riot.

How can the dead help the living? Forensic pathologist Roger Byard delivers the UTAS Arthur Cobbold Memorial Lecture, Lessons from the Mortuary.

A conversation between musician and composer Warren Ellis (Dirty Three, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Grinderman) and Zan Rowe from Double J. A live recording of Double J’s Take 5 radio segment and podcast.

It’s a party

Dress to excess. [Tickets selling fast]

Altar is a temple of live music, in the heart of the city, opening at Dark Mofo and continuing beyond. Altar will showcase a curated mix of emerging and established artists, including Briggs, Lonnie Holley, Phurpa, and Author & Punisher.

At the Salamanca Art Centre

I can’t quite put my finger on it.

The Inbetween celebrates liminal spaces and the undefinable. Featuring The Irresistible: an award-winning, unsettling play about memory, desire and depravity, in the spirit of Twin Peaks and Stranger Things.